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yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."

Not only have the "sixth sense" used for horizontal awareness, but also vertical awareness! Imagine having the instruments being "beamed" into your head so that you didn't even need to look at the dash to know the pitch and direction of the plane?!?

You may be disappointed to discover that the technology is more like multitouch gestures in the middle of the air with a projector. This has precious little to do with brain-computer interfaces of any kind.

Cannot handle the G forces, I agree. But too slow? Then why do UAV's still have human pilots via remote control. Humans are being taken out because the aircraft are much more maneuverable without a human body blacking out during sustained g-forces. Also, that pesky bit about losing trained airmen when an aircraft is lost.

Um... We do have fully automated drones flying around, both with and without bombs attached.

We do have fully automated drones flying around, both with and without pilots attached...

You'd be surprised what a good autopilot can do. Did you know the space shuttle, using 70s tech, lands itself, with the only human interaction being pushing the landing gear doors? No kidding hands completely off from orbit to runway using 40 year old tech?

You'd be surprised what a good autopilot can do. Did you know the space shuttle, using 70s tech, lands itself, with the only human interaction being pushing the landing gear doors? No kidding hands completely off from orbit to runway using 40 year old tech?

But...but... what about Hillary Swank heroically landing the space shuttle in Los Angeles in The Core

Wow. Parent and grandparent both modded insightful and both completely off base. Where to start?

Current UAVs have about 1/5th the maximum speed of current fighter jets and are purposely designed to be less maneuverable. This is to keep it as close to straight and level as possible even with problems like a sudden gust of wind. I'd be surprised if they ever momentarily pull much more than 2-3 Gs, much less a sustained > 10 Gs. The argument for UAVs has nothing to do with G forces or pilot response ti

True, but the counter argument played out by the owners of patents and copyrights is that innovation would be dead if there was not stringent FBI level enforcement of I.P. including stringent fines and jail time. Well I guess that followed after those were commodized such that the owners of those properties were not the innovators for the most part, and the innovators are not the major benefactors of their innovation. Altruism is not dead, idea's don't have to always be owned and sold. I think we should go

Which happens to be a rhetorical device, and not the Godwin's Law of debate.

I'm very happy that the young repub... I'm sorry, young libertarian crowd have mastered the identification of this one tool. However, you still have all of these [virtualsalt.com] to go. Better get cracking.

I'm not sure you understand the difference between a rhetorical device (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, etc) and a fallacy (ad hominem, begging the question, straw man).

I super quick test in case you aren't sure: a rhetorical device, when used correctly and understood by the target audience, will always enhance the idea you are trying to convey, whereas a fallacy cannot be used correctly by definition, and when understood by the target audience will always undermine the idea you are trying to convey.

Fallacies are a subset of the rhetorical device set, and can be a valuable tool in debate if used with judgment. Remember, you're trying to convince people, not play hugs and cuddles with your opponent.

I'd love to say that I'm surprised by your ignorant yet superior attitude, but then I'm not new here.

Fallacies are a subset of the rhetorical device set, and can be a valuable tool in debate if used with judgment. Remember, you're trying to convince people, not play hugs and cuddles with your opponent.

I'd love to say that I'm surprised by your ignorant yet superior attitude, but then I'm not new here.

If you actually have a case, you won't need fallacies... moreover, their use, assuming your audience has a clue, can only make you look bad.

True innovation takes effort. Effort costs money. Giving away your stuff isn't usually a good way to make money.

"Open source" efforts are generally quite effective at delivering answers to problems that are already well-understood and answered. Witness the whole Open-source UNIX phenomenon - UNIX was an long-standing operating system in the 1980s when it really started to gain steam, and it's downright ancient today. The problems of running a POSIX-style system are well understood.

This incorrectly implies that the only reason for innovation is to directly make money off them.

As countless Open Source projects (such as Apache, Linux, etc.) have proven - collaborative projects require *less* effort for innovation, and result in better projects for less money.

Truly new ideas, however, are usually "held back" and kept proprietary for a while during which time the inventor/developer of the idea profits.

Only if the inventor/developer's main goal is to sell the "innovation" for a profit. If the goal is reduced costs, it makes sense to share the development burden with others, so that everybody benefits.

This incorrectly implies that the only reason for innovation is to directly make money off them.

Ok, you just agreed that true innovation requires money, often large somes of money. Where does that money come from, if no profit is made off of the innovations? Donations do not work anywhere near as well as investments, and getting income indirectly is tricky and often impossible depending the potential uses for a given innovation.

It seems like it follows pretty well to me.

The parent never said money was the "only reason for innovation", but given that the primary means we as a society use to reward in

'put paid to the canard'
This one confused me too, since it seemed like a mistake at first
a canard is a groundless rumor / belief
'put paid to' is a phrase meaning "to deal with effectively, to finish something off"
So, it means finishing off the groundless belief that they're incompatible

Perhaps you are trolling, but the phrase in question is "put paid" not "paid to the....". And it basically means the debt is paid and you no longer have to worry about it.

I'm personally more concerned that someone who went to MIT thinks that a technology that interacts with a person is a sense. For something to be a sense, in the accepted meaning of the word, it's going to have to convey information to a person's brain. And for it to be new, it's going to have to not use sight, hearing, touch, taste, or sm

I'm personally more concerned that someone who went to MIT thinks that a technology that interacts with a person is a sense. For something to be a sense, in the accepted meaning of the word, it's going to have to convey information to a person's brain. And for it to be new, it's going to have to not use sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell.

If you follow it back to the original presentation (the "Demoed" link, you can see there is nothing even vaguely akin to a sense, although the head of the lab does use that term.

It is more like Microsoft Surface in a wearable form, sans the surface.

The free dictionary tells me that "put paid to [thefreedictionary.com] " means "to consider something closed or completed; to mark or indicate that something is no longer important or pending".
And that "canard [thefreedictionary.com] " means "An unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story."
So am assuming the author wants to say that the opening up of SixthSense via an open source license will stop the false stories that open source does not lead to innovation.

The sixth sense is accelleration. Sensory data is provided by the semicircular canals and is interpreted as sensations, therefore it deserves the title of 'sense'. Proprioception may also qualify, even though it is a derived/calculated sense.

I give this example to my children to teach the important fact that most every person and most every textbook on Earth can be clearly and demonstrably wrong about something obvious.

"Acceleration" is correct. The GP is taking advantage of the fact that we know from General Relativity that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. You know when you are upside-down by the direction of your acceleration (downward, toward your feet, rather than the more usual upward).

When hanging upside down from a bar, this sense allows you to tell that you are upside down. You are not moving in any direction, your current speed relative to your surroundings is zero, and this speed is not changing. How does this have anything to do with acceleration?

There is a downward force trying to accelerate you, it just can't because your feet are attached to the bar. It does, however, accelerate the various fluids in your inner ear parts. Those same inner ear parts detect the movement and your brain interprets that so you know that you're upside down.

But going back to the original issue, gravity is always applying an accelerating force on you. It's just that if you're standing on the ground, the ground pushes back with an equal force (for every action there's an

Actually you are accelerating - so long as you are standing on the earth you are constantly accelerating.

Acceleration is a change in velocity, not speed. Velocity can change with a change in speed OR direction, or both obviously.

While standing on the ground, gravity applies a force that accelerates you toward the ground instead of allowing you to fly off into space like your velocity at any given moment in time should cause you to do.

In other words, even though gravity cannot accelerate you by increasing y

If something is "not moving" in a gravitational field, that is equivalent to it being accelerated out of the field. It's one of those gravity-warps-spacetime things. It helps to think of gravity not as a force causing acceleration, but rather as a distortion in the shape of space/time such that objects in free-fall—those with no forces acting on them, and thus no acceleration—follow a "straight line" (constant motion) in the curved space, which merely looks like a curved path (or accelerated mot

I would have thought that the inner ear is simply detecting the orientation of the liquid within it, and the force of gravity acting upon the liquid is affecting the orientation that it assumes.

That's not entirely wrong, but it's not complete, either. The critical difference is that when other forces are acting on you, such that your total acceleration is not equal to your acceleration due to gravity, this will alter your sense of orientation. The inner ear tracks the force exerted by its solid shell (and by extension, your body) on the liquid inside. Gravity acts on both equally, and thus doesn't register on its own. What you perceive as the downward pull of a gravitational field is actually just

The inner ear tracks the force exerted by the liquid on the solid shell, for example, not the other way round.

Actually, the inner ear detects which side the liquid is concentrated on by measuring disturbances in the microscopic hairs which line the inside. It also has a complex shape which allows it to detect rotation as well as orientation. However, the details are not all that important here. The point is simply that there is no way for the inner ear to detect gravity as separate from (non-gravitational) acceleration.

It's the body itself that senses the downward pull of gravity.

So you can tell the different between free-fall in a gravitational field and free-fall in empty s

True. I showed my mother the video on the TED website and she (a physical therapist) immediately spotted it. She said it should be called the eigth sense. after accelleration, proprioception, and orientation.
That last one is the wrong word because I forgot what it was called but I meant the sense of where you are relative to yourself (upside down, horizontal, etc)

Aren't those just different applications of "touch" ? Essentially I know I'm moving or upside down because I feel the effects of Gravity, and the feeling of those things is purely because of the physical pressure applied to nerves. Or at least my limitted understanding of Biology would lead me to believe that, I never took full Bio in high school.

Wheras Sight is based on light entering your eyes, sound is your interpretation of mini air compressions around you, taste and smell have to do with different rece

Equilibrioception is the name for the sense of acceleration and the sense of angular momentum. Technically, they are two senses, with two distinct mechanisms of action. There are also thermoception, the sense of temperature, and nociception, the sense of pain, which is also actually three senses, one for skin, one for bones, one for organs.

Or is it that the radius of earth's orbit is so large that the centripetal acceleration is actually quite small at any given moment.

I calculated this once. You weigh about 1% less at the equator than you do at the poles, due to centripetal acceleration. You can already sense acceleration due to gravity at both locations, but a 1% difference is so small, you would only notice it if you teleported from the equator to the pole in an instant.

I don't see how you can have a sense of acceleration. Perhaps change of acceleration....but acceleration? Categorically NO.
We orbit the sun, but i wager you have no sense of angular acceleration about the sun. The other senses are persistent.

And, by the same logic, we cannot possibly see cars as we cannot see paramecium.

I don't see how you can have a sense of acceleration. Perhaps change of acceleration....but acceleration? Categorically NO.We orbit the sun, but i wager you have no sense of angular acceleration about the sun.

Substitute the word velocity for acceleration throughout your entire post, then you are correct.

I've never gotten paid for anything I've written. I give it all away. The reward is called "Pride"
As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they devlop things like this. As long as I have a decent job that pays my bills and afords me the time to work on software, I will continue to do so. But when employment barely pays my rent and my managers expect me to come in early and work late to the point that I have no time to do anything rewarding at all, everyone suffers because I can not continue to work on things that may or may not be profitable in the end.
In my opinion the biggest obstacle in the way of innovation is profit.

I've never gotten paid for anything I've written. I give it all away. The reward is called "Pride"
As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they devlop things like this. As long as I have a decent job that pays my bills and afords me the time to work on software, I will continue to do so. But when employment barely pays my rent and my managers expect me to come in early and work late to the point that I have no time to do anything rewarding at all, everyone suffers because I can not continue to work on things that may or may not be profitable in the end.
In my opinion the biggest obstacle in the way of innovation is profit.

I think you misunderstand the idea of what profit is. Re-read what you wrote,

"to the point that I have no time to do anything rewarding at all"

How are you profiting there?

"As long as I have a decent job that pays my bills and afords me the time to work on software"

You are profiting here. But by your logic, if profit stands in the way of innovation, your having a job would stand in the way of your working on this software.

"As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they develop things like this."

Not everyone values this as much as you may. If what he develops is truly valued by others, they will actually pay for it. You will give up some of your money - which came from time and effort on your part - to compensate him for his time and

As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they devlop things like this.

Why don't we let current trends continue, and allow Google to eventually become the world government? Not only will I get free e-mail, but my roads will probably either be properly paved or be replaced with a more efficient road technology that I can use for free so long as I never move very large cargo.

In my opinion the biggest obstacle in the way of innovation is profit.

I think it's corporatism, but we could argue all day. Sometimes I think it's private ownership of land.

The link titled "demoed earlier this year" links to the slashdot story that was a summary of it. It requires a tiny bit of thought and/or effort. If it were summarized again then the story would be flamed with "DUPE! DUPE! DUPE! HOW DARE YOU DUPE ME SLASHDOT!" posts. Whoever tagged the parent as insightful should not be given any more mod points.

Ever since watching the sixth sense TED conference, I've been wanting this, but I want the light projected in something you can't see unless you are wearing special glasses. That way the person I'm tagging doesn't know I've just printed on his chest that he's an idiot to avoid.

Exactly what I was thinking. I want the "gargoyle" like glasses from Stephenson's (and others) sci fi. Augmented Reality that visually appears like in the TED video, but is instead projected on the inside of the glasses or onto my eyeballs directly. A few high-quality cameras could map the 3D space so the projection could "wrap around the paper towels" or simply hover above it.

I mean, the tech is cool, don't get me wrong. Having dealt with multitouch for some years now I get it. But seriously, would anyone want to strap on a backpack, attach a bunch of gizmos to his chest, tape colors to his fingers, only to display PRE-PROGRAMMED information? I mean, the video of him is all marketing gimmick. A preloaded video of Barack Obama on the newspaper, clever bit of camera trickery. I don't see this gaining traction anymore than those wearable computers with the little lcd screen in

A terrible concept, so says you. While I agree that much of the video was marketing gimmicks, that is what it was supposed to be, marketing the idea to others. So what is wrong with that? The tech is more than cool, it goes along with several ideas that I have had that I just don't know how to implement. This could help out a lot. It's funny that they use toilet paper, because that is an example that I have had. Imagine if we combined Wolfram Alpha with data about all products and also combined with somethi

It's not a terrible concept, it's simply a solution looking for a problem.

But seriously, would anyone want to strap on a backpack, attach a bunch of gizmos to his chest, tape colors to his fingers, only to display PRE-PROGRAMMED information?

The object he's showing is a prototype and will naturally have a larger form-factor relative to any final product. The reason for the backpack is to have something to hold his dev machine which runs the software. This can easily be put into a smaller computer or micro-controller at some later point in time. And all those gizmos amount to the coordination of multiple devices: web cam and projector, simply because no one has thought to

Don't be such a jerk. There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about the utility of such a system. The history of technology development has plenty of "clever" ideas that were ultimately dead ends (eg Cue Cat). "Find that killer app" is very difficult step. Your example didn't convince me since none of those activities (reading, email, teleconference) can't already be done as good or better with a laptop or handheld computer.

not sure about that. seeing the ted video got me very interested. it would be quite cool to point this thing at a bus schedule to get delays projected on it, or see that there's bad weather at the end of my flight so i can plan for possible delays.or display prices or availability of a specific product in other neraby shops. or give me on-product "clickable" list of all additives so that i can figure out which ones i don't want to consume (even better - just allow me to preconfigure list of substances to av

> has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible for once and for all

Wrong. Depending who you talk to, innovation is either a great idea or a process. If it's a great idea, putting it out as open source says nothing about open source at all. If it's a process, then it hasn't happened yet, because the idea only just now got introduced as open source and there's been no time for any process at all.

HMD production. If it doesn't some one is asleep at the wheel. For a concept demonstration, projecting stuff onto the real world is fine, but in practice it is horrible. The missing link for effective augmented reality like this is an effective variable transparency head mounted displays. I hope something like this [youtube.com]makes it to mass market sooner rather than later.

The stuff that comes out of upper floors of the Media Lab generally don't commercialize well. Anyone remember Charmed Technologies? A couple of grads from the same group tried to commercialize wearable computers - the company didn't survive the bubble collapsing.
The first floor of the Media Lab is different; they're more like traditional researchers and work on things like e-ink. But the upper floors generate demo after demo, that look cute and generate press, but not much commercial value.

The device is pretty cool. Of course there's a huge bottle-neck - the communications companies providing your connectivity. I'm sure they'd love a device like this as an excuse to gouge you even more on bandwidth and dig ever deeper into your pockets. So much so that the communication companies would probably make a device like this impractical. Unless you are willing to pay an extra $200/month low low "flat rate".

We need to get rid of the middlemen. Sadly that's not going to happen soon. Too bad such a cre

MIT does not tend to arbitrarily give away its intellectual property, particularly these days. He may discover, as a lot of grad students there discover, that what they want and what MIT wants are not the same thing. They tend to be very cooperative about licensing the work back to the grad student -- for a share of the proceeds, but cooperative licensing is not the same as being willing to give it away.

The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source.

Cut the crap. The demo is nice and couldn't help but make me smile, but what is there to commercialise? This is just the same type of novelty crap you get to see all the time these days, wearable crap, augmented reality, tangible interfaces and other paper interfaces.

No one asked what it could possibly theoretically used for, I asked what it could be commercialised for. Tell me how you're gonna sell that to anyone, and what you're gonna sell it as precisely, and to whom.